BOOKS OF THE TIMES

BOOKS OF THE TIMES;Fe, Fi, Fo, Whoa! The Inner Giant Has Taken Over.

By WALTER GOODMAN

Published: June 19, 1996

THE SIBLING SOCIETY By Robert Bly 319 pages. Addison-Wesley. $25.

As you can discover in any chapter of Robert Bly's new jeremiad, he is outraged by a society in which children grow up without fathers and with rotten schools, their brains stupefied by television, their imaginations squelched by computers, their sensibilities coarsened by rock music and exploitative movies, their dreams corrupted by advertising. Instead of growing into maturity with the help of older mentors who can pass along the experience of generations, they remain in a state of perpetual adolescence: selfish, acquisitive, spiritually flattened, dangerous. Welcome to "The Sibling Society."

The indictment, less original than the label, is a cousin to "Iron John," Mr. Bly's best seller, which generated a sort of men's movement in America. Here again, he draws on myth, religion, fairy tales, poems and even science of sorts for evidence of the wisdom that he argues has been discarded by a society that disdains the past. To borrow his language, we now live laterally, keeping an envious eye on one another, rather than vertically, in the glow of wise authority.

The book begins with an elaborate exegesis of "Jack and the Beanstalk," especially the nature of the Giant whom Mr. Bly likens to the primitive human brain, to the nafs, which, he reports, is the ever-demanding soul of Muslim and Sufi tradition, and to the Freudian id, all of which keep human beings in perpetual battle to satisfy insatiable appetites. As for Jack, he "represents all men and women who live in a fatherless and, increasingly, motherless society."

Mr. Bly is an accomplished storyteller, and his affection for the tales of many peoples over many centuries can be catching. But when it comes to the contemporary condition, his propheteering arias seem as out of control as the nafs: "The teen-agers in our inner cities are expressing the presence of the Giant, who is fundamentally opposed to life. He is the one who stabs people in the library and eats children." And beware: "We don't realize that when we put a computer or television in a child's own room, we are sending that child to be alone with the Giant."

Before you know it, Mr. Bly is attributing the growth of armed militias, unemployment and all manner of other ailments to siblingitis. For him, politics is psychology; he finds the roots of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the opposition to affirmative action in societal dysfunction.

Some of the presumable facts he tosses in as evidence of the national disarray are risible. Lamenting the flat language bred by television, he writes: "A poll a few years ago revealed that the average American father talked to his child for about 10 minutes a day. We know by contrast that in certain parts of Russia, earlier in the century, the Russian father spent more like two hours engaging in such talk. Russians have a word for 'soul-talk,' and it wasn't unusual for a grandfather to say to a granddaughter, 'Let's go out by the tree and have some soul-talk.' "

And he combines a vacuum-cleaner approach to the world's problems with a salesman's bent for wildly disproportionate comparisons. After lumping together the slaughters in Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia and Cambodia as expressions of siblingdom triumphant, he adds, "Our sibling society came into existence by different means, but there is a comparable elimination of elders, accompanied by increasing anger on the part of youth."

Toward the end of his new book, Mr. Bly complains that most reviewers, trapped in "the flat, literal or sociological mode in which there is only one world," treated "Iron John" in a simplistic way. But the notable thing about his first book of prose was its success. With help from a Bill Moyers interview on PBS, it stayed on the best-seller list of The New York Times for more than a year, several weeks as No. 1. It was like a second coming of Joseph Campbell. As for reviews, most of those I have read swallowed the whole thing.

Credit for that success must go largely to Mr. Bly's enthusiasm for myth, his talent as a storyteller and the fact that he was onto a serious subject, the pathology of sons without fathers. It also offered the novelty of a men's movement as a sort of counter to or sibling of the women's movement and the promise of self-improvement cultivated by public broadcasting.

"The Sibling Society" has some of the same appeals. It should also please liberals. Noting that "our first thoroughly sibling Congress" is not about to "defend children, nor wetlands, nor blacks, nor women, nor full-growth forests, nor the Alaska wilderness," he concludes, "Some sibling meanness has interrupted the understanding people had in the 1960's that we are all related." Was that really "the understanding" in the 1960's?

If I cannot rouse more enthusiasm for "The Sibling Society," it may be because grandpa never took me out by the tree for some soul-talk. That is probably why I do not share the author's admiration for such hierarchical or God-directed communities as medieval monasteries, mistrust his treatment of history and find his rhapsodies to supposedly more spiritual cultures a touch smoky. ("Native Americans felt horror that white people would take peyote with no elders present, no one to clear the air or protect the souls from invasions by those spirits who do not wish us well.") And generally, the use of myth to make points in political argument strikes me as no favor either to myth or to politics.

The book ends with a charming telling of a great story from Sweden, the "Lind Wurm": When the queen is delivered of a tiny snake, as her first offspring, the midwife throws it out the window, with momentous consequences. Typically, Mr. Bly reduces a rich tale to fit his by now predictable litany: "Because of 'downsizing,' parental neglect and bad schools, almost every member of Generation X, or the Day-Care Generation, feels thrown out the window."

No, don't throw his book out the window. At least read the fairy tales. "The Sibling Society" is by turns engaging and exasperating, suggestive and tendentious, a mix of imagination, scholarship and remarkable silliness. Although he announces, in his take-no-prisoners way, "Television is the thalidomide of the 1990's," I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Bly showed up on PBS again soon.